Latinx Students Recount Their Time at PEA

An hour and thirty minutes away from Exeter, children hold up their arms in front of lower Juliette Ortiz’s younger sister. “This is a wall, and you can’t cross it,” they say.

Ortiz described the impact of such instances on her sense of belonging. “This is happening to my sister and me, and we’re saying it’s not that big of a deal—but it’s an anti-immigrant symbol, it’s an anti-me and my family symbol.”

During a Halloween contest, three Grill staff members walked on stage, wearing a costume of a wall with the slogan “Make America Great Again” written across the brick pattern. A protest in Grill ensued the following day, highlighting the “lack of concern for the Latinx community on the Academy’s campus,” according to a distributed statement.

In the wake of the protest, students and faculty shared their experiences and hopes for the respect of Latinx community.“I want people to know there’s a Nicaragua, there’s a South America and a Central America,” Modern Languages Instructor Jacqueline Flores said. “It does not matter how many years I’ve taught the students, but I religiously give an empty map of Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean on the first day of classes. Every first day of the term, it doesn’t matter how many years I’ve taught the students, those maps are often blank.”

Students of the Latinx community, such as senior Cristal Reyes, also have to navigate the dominant culture at the Academy. “Sometimes we wonder if the teacher is giving us a good grade because we wrote well or because our experience is interesting to them because it’s different and unique,” she said.

Modern Languages Instructor Viviana Santos explained the most challenging part of living in this community is to balance her identity with being an Exonian. “I cannot speak for students, but as a Latina teacher here I have always struggled with staying true to who I am, while trying to meet the expectations of the institution,” Santos said. “My heritage is very important to me. I have found over the last almost 20 years that I have taught here, that it is not always seen as a positive thing to hold on to that heritage.”

Ortiz, too, has encountered insensitive comments over the course of her Exeter experience. “I’ve been told that I’m not Hispanic because I’m not brown enough, and I know a lot of kids have heard, ‘you’re not Hispanic because you don’t speak Spanish,’” she said.

Insensitivity arises in institutional circumstances as well, Flores detailed. For example, the dining hall prepares Mexican food for Cinco de Mayo, though the celebration does not originate from Mexico.

Another concern, Flores pointed out, was the “revolving door” of faculty of color. “We used to have amazing faculty of color that were here and I thought they were going to stay, but they got no support,” Flores said. “So for my last continuous professional development (CPD) report, I wrote [about] the revolving door of faculty of color who had come in and out because they were never accepted.”

Flores herself is still committed to staying at Exeter despite the loneliness. “I am here because I want to be here not only for students of color but also for the entire community. I want everyone to know that I am here in different capacities and that I form part of the Phillips Exeter Academy Community,”she said. “I do not want our community members of color to be invisible.”

LAL co-head and senior David Gonzalez described his own experience trying to find Latinx faculty to advise LAL. “Last year, we went through the list of Latinx faculty because we were trying to find a potential advisor for LAL and we found something like nine faculty in the entire faculty body,” he said. “ It’s impressively sad—I think the school has addressed some issues of under-representation, but to a lot in the Latinx community, it feels like there just hasn’t been enough yet.”

Often, Ortiz feels a general lack of representation in the Exeter community. “It’s hard to make a big deal about the problems we face because there’s so little of us who actually understand what’s going on,” she said. “I know I’ve gotten a lot of side comments, and sometimes it feels lonely.”

For La Alianza Latina (LAL) co-head and senior Natalia Rivera, her experience has been different than her white peers both in and out of the classroom. “If we’re talking about how Latinas are disproportionately affected, we can talk about the town … We can talk about not being able to see myself in the faculty members, because there are so few that are Latinx or we can talk about the classmates, how I typically am the only Latinx or just person of color, for that matter, in my classes.”

These factors contribute to a feeling of otherness, Santos explained. “I will always feel a little too foreign, and a lot different from folks who come from this area of the United States or from families where boarding school was a tradition,” she said.

In these experiences, Flores noted,the impact of the wall symbolism was exacerbated.  “When I saw the video of the contest, it broke me because that hatred does not belong in our community, especially when you’ve invested years of your life here,” she said. “How could you not be aware of what that wall means when that man from day one attached the wall to hatred towards people like me?”

Reyes recalled her fellow students’ first impression of the wall costume. “That day I walked into my history class and someone was like, the Halloween costume was really funny,” Reyes said. “Having immigrant parents from Mexico, it’s a touchy subject for me.”

In fact, this is not the first time wall imagery has appeared on campus, Reyes mentioned. “My prep year, when Trump was elected, students were walking around with build a wall pins and I was pretty freaked out, not because of their political views but because of the assertive manner in which they were expressing them,” she said. “In my classes, I expressed my fear about the wall, especially considering my mom was self-deported to Mexico in 2015, and there was a lot of misunderstanding.”

Self-deportation is the process by which undocumented immigrants choose to leave the U.S. instead of undergoing the native court’s deportation process.

Lower Charles Falivena noted that the number of allies from Exeter’s white population involved in the protest were limited. “People are often allies when it is convenient to them, but for the white community, when the general community is in opposition, there are very few that will stand up,” he said.

“I’m very disappointed in the response to the hurt within our community of both faculty and students,” upper Sarah Huang said.“I think that the reaction to the costume itself was one thing—perhaps a lack of understanding or experience—but the much more indicative and concerning response was many students’ reactions to the protest... As diverse as the student body is, we’re not that inclusive.”

English Instructor Courtney Marshall explained the place that non-proximate students and faculty should take in discussions. “If you’re not in that community affected, it’s not your place to make a judgement on hurt that is not your own,” she said.

Insensitivity and a resulting protest is nothing new, Marshall reflected. “We have a real emergency here,” she said. “What I’ve been thinking about this week is people’s willingness or desire to hold on to this idealized vision of what they think this school is,” she said. “When incidents happen, some people say they’re just aberrations and are shocked. At this point, I’m wondering how many times we need to do this—when will people realize we are in a state of emergency?”

Due to this lack of action, Huang believes that the Exeter community must continue to challenge itself. “Diversity is not a box to check—it’s a starting point for empathy and cultivation of a stronger community as a whole.”

Past LAL cohead Alejandro Arango reflected on the manner in which Exonians balance knowledge and goodness. “I think despite rhetoric of knowledge and goodness, I definitely found during my experience that knowledge was at the forefront and goodness was in a backseat,” he said. “I think that this may be the difficulty of bringing people from a wide background— race, intersectionality and gender— into one community. How do you ensure that they all have an equal understanding of what it means to come to the table and treat people with decency and respect?”

Often, attitudes to change only occur after significant prodding, Gonzalez concluded. “I think it’s been a tough because the Exeter administration is a very reactive organization rather than a very proactive organization,” he said.

Reflecting on her past years at the Academy, Rivera harbors doubts about the community’s ability to adequately respond. “There are just so many people that want to deny that there are issues,” she said. “It just makes it a lot harder for me to confidently say that I think things are going to change soon.”